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- Modular quick-release camera strap
- Brain filters and how people see software
- Vision therapy: Part Three
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Personal
We got caught up in the Southwest cancellations adventure over Christmas. Our initial flight out was delayed several hours due to delayed crew. After eventually boarding we had two aborted taxiing attempts interrupted by (different) maintenance issues before the flight was finally cancelled at approximately the time we should've been arriving in our destination. Fortunately, we did extricate ourselves and get our bags back. Unfortunately, we had to grab a Lyft home at 3 AM in breezy 13°F weather.
The Christmas Eve flight they rebooked us on also ended up cancelled, though fortunately it was cancelled before we left for the airport (after several hours of incremental delays).
We hosted a lovelly Christmas dinner with friends (several of whom were also caught up in the travel weather drama) at home instead.
Work
I'm working for CVS Health in their Enterprise Workforce Management team supporting front-store, pharmacy, and contact center forecasting and labor models. Most of my day-to-day is building out foundational tooling in Python to support data gathering and execution of those models. I'm also working to getting version control (git) deployed with a semi-technical team of mostly-analysts. We have some aspirational goals to deploy machine learning models to improve forecasting accuracy, but we're still in the early stages of that and, frankly, don't have the technical resources to support it yet.
The scale at which a company as large as CVS operates has been eye opening. When you're dealing with ~10,000 stores a year's worth of daily data for the whole fleet is already 3.65M rows. Not exactly big data, but beyond the scope of what Excel can handle, which led previous implementations to aggregate at the monthly level with presents some significant difficulties for modeling.
There are lots of interesting challenges, and it's gratifying to be in a role where I can flex both my retail and contact center experience. Some unfortunate difficulty with IT resources to support my work has been frustrating, but I'm hopeful that will improve.
Reading
Still working on Ward, the sequel to Worm, which is somehow longer than the first book. I had a really hard time getting through the first 15% of the novel. It's different enough from the first that it's taking a lot of energy to get into it. I am less engaged with the main protagonist. Been working at it for a year and only a little more than halfway through. This has killed a lot of my progress with reading this year.
Finally sitting down and reading It Starts With Food fully instead of skimming various selections.